Domestic life and video-game music shaped Basia Bulat’s most recent batch of songs
Montreal-based singer-songwriter talks about the dreamy layers of sound that went into her latest album—and stripping them away for her new EP and solo tour
Basia Bulat
Basia Bulat performs at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on September 20 at 7:30 pm
IF YOU LIKE the sound of Basia Bulat’s 2025 album Basia’s Palace, you have motherhood and 1990s video games to thank, at least in part.
The Montreal-based singer-songwriter has a style rooted in acoustic folk, but throughout a recording career that has spanned two decades, she has taken her share of sonic detours. On 2016’s Good Advice, for example, Bulat added a few dashes of indie rock and R&B to the mix, while for 2022’s The Garden, she teamed up with a string quartet to reinvent songs from her catalogue as chamber-pop mini-masterpieces.
Basia’s Palace was created in the basement of the house Bulat shares with her husband (fellow musician Andrew Woods) and their two children—a two-year-old and a newborn, at the time. That domestic reality heavily influenced the songs, and so did Dragon Warrior IV.
“I was playing a lot of video games, and I was listening to a lot of the music of the video games of my childhood,” says Bulat when Stir reaches her by phone at a rehearsal space where she’s preparing for her upcoming solo tour. “I didn't really feel like watching movies or TV. A lot of people say when you have a little baby, you end up watching a lot of TV or movies, and I was just playing a lot of my favourite video games from when I was a kid, stuff like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger. And so I was really inspired by all the synth music of that moment.
“I think also because it was such a slow, kind of suspended-in-time era of my life, it was easy to kind of just get into the headphones. Some of the songs are very danceable, but then a lot of them are also very chill, very dreamlike.”
Indeed, from the insistent, bass-driven groove of “My Angel” to the shimmering ethereality of “The Moon” and “Laughter”, Basia’s Palace has no lack of range. What ties the whole record together is a feeling of sun-bathed warmth that is never strictly retro, even if some of the tools used to create it definitely were.
These included a Unitra Eltra Rytm 16, a drum machine made in Soviet-era Poland, which Bulat’s coproducer, Mark Lawson, found online.
“The working title for the album was actually Family, because it was all these different songs about this little new family that I was nurturing, and kind of also thinking about my past and my roots, and this drum machine was a really fun way of honouring that,” Bulat says.
The singer was raised in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, the child of Polish immigrants. She grew up surrounded by music, thanks to her mother’s job teaching piano and guitar and her late father’s unabashed love for disco polo. A uniquely Polish genre combining folk melodies, pop hooks, and Eurodance beats, disco polo hit its peak of popularity in the 1990s, but its biggest hits remain staples at weddings and other family gatherings.
Bulat has yet to dabble in the oft-maligned genre herself, but she paid her own sort of tender tribute to it on Basia’s Palace. In the nostalgically bittersweet “Disco Polo”, she sings in both English and Polish: “Mama would play guitar, Papa had his disco, disco polo/Mama na gitarze grała, tata słuchał disco, disco polo.”
In April of this year, Bulat performed in Poland for the first time in several years, playing concerts in Krakow, Warsaw, and Wrocław. “I really wanted to make this trip to Poland not just for a gig,” she says. “I wanted to take my kids with me and I brought my mom and my husband, and we made a whole family voyage and it was incredible, and the shows were incredible. I was really, truly blown away. Like, I will start crying if I think about it too much, but it was wild.”
There was, naturally, one particular song that resonated with Bulat’s Polish fans in a way that it wouldn’t with any other audience.
“There's nobody that better understands the subject matter of ‘Disco Polo’ than people who survive this genre every day,” she says. “It's the kind of thing that everybody says they hate, but then, of course, at the wedding at midnight, when your ciocia and your wujek—you know, all your aunts and uncles—are dancing, you’re going to get up and you’re going to dance and sing with them too, right?”
“Disco Polo” is one of several Basia’s Palace songs that Bulat re-recorded in a more stripped-down fashion for a five-track release called Bouquet, which came out at the end of August. That EP was inspired by an interactive segment built into the concerts on her most recent tour.
“When we were touring Basia's Palace with the band, I had this moment in the show that I would call the ‘Basia all-acoustic, all-request extravaganza eleganza’ kind of moment. People would shout out requests, and some of them would be the songs from the new record, and so I played them acoustic as well.”
For her current solo tour, Bulat has ensured that each of the venues she’s booked will have a piano available. At the time of this interview, she’s still figuring out which instruments she’ll be bringing with her—definitely a couple of guitars and an autoharp, possibly a charango, and maybe even a synthesizer. (So much for “all-acoustic”!) As for which one she’ll play on any given song, that’s anyone’s guess.
“The fun part about the all-request section of the show, that I’m now expanding for this solo tour, is that it always kind of hit me by surprise, whatever people would shout out, whether it’s an old song or a new song—and it depended on what instrument I was on,” Bulat says. “I was like, ‘Okay, well, let me see if I can play this on a piano.’”
“For better or for worse, I like to keep a little bit of a feeling of living on the edge, or a little bit of danger, and not just have everything perfectly rehearsed,” she admits. “Obviously, I’m rehearsing weeks ahead, but I’d like to be able to feel like I can kind of be playful, and I don’t feel necessarily tethered to one instrument or another.” 
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